Choose the Perfect Online Backup Storage Solution and Free Your Files

A few weeks ago we looked at moving to the clouds, and clearly, this is a concept that isn’t going away. Of course, we would be the first to admit there are some limitations, but the promise of freeing ourselves from the shackles of a single machine is clearly within our grasp. For the most part, we are sold on the idea of cloud-based email clients, and even photo and music sharing, But what about bulk storage for our files and sensitive documents? For many users, this is a line that simply cannot be crossed. The sheer thought of sending private information halfway across the world via the World Wide Web is simply too much to handle.

Unlike many cloud services however, online storage provides a solution to a very unique need that is difficult to satisfy: offsite backups. In today’s age of 2 TB hard drives, keeping all your information, even backed up on multiple drives does you little good if they are all in the same location. A fire or a break-in could leave you with nothing but a decade of lost files, and a handful of regret. So rather than updating a USB hard drive and shipping it to your buddy's house every few months, wouldn't it be great if you could archive your files online, securely and inexpensively? Good news, you can! Plenty of free and paid options exist, but how are you to know which services will best suit your needs? In this article we will look at the most popular solutions available, and help you navigate the chaotic seas of web 2.0 solutions.

The Choice: Understand Your Needs

The sheer number of online backup services is somewhat dizzying. As with any Web 2.0 category, making sense of it all is nearly impossible. Before you look at the options below it’s important for you to take a close look at your requirements and answer a few simple questions.

1.) How much space will I really need online?2.) Will I need to access this information from remote locations within a web browser and how often?3.) Will you require your PC to have a virtual folder, or drive that maps to my online storage?4.) What is the maximum size of the files you need to store?5.) How important is the security of these files in transit, and in storage?

If you’re the impatient type, you can simply skip to the end of this article and look at our feature roundup to match your requirements to the best suited service. If however you’re interested in learning about the best options out there, we have broken our top 4 choices into four categories.

Best Integration of Desktop & Web Access (Free)

Pros: Dropbox is a relatively new entrant into the online storage market, but it’s lightweight and snappy desktop interface is a definite plus. Its desktop application offers users a virtual folder in which they can drag and drop, cut and paste, as well as auto syncing of files or folders. You can also access your content from any web browser. Sharing files is also easily managed, and the cost per GB is very reasonable if you opt in for the paid package.

(Desktop Interface)

Cons: If 2 GB isn’t enough, your only other option is the premium service which offers 50 GB for $9.99 per month. Files can be uploaded and download securely via SSL, but a lack of server side encryption means information stored on the server is in the clear and accessible to Dropbox administrators. For most people this isn’t a big deal, but chances are if you’re wearing a hat made of tin foil you might want to make note of this.The 50 GB limit also doesn’t make it a very useful option if you’re looking to backup your entire media collection.

(Web Interface)

Conclusion: Dropbox is an excellent solution if you own and administrate multiple PC’s. Sharing files has never been easier, and as long as your size requirements are fairly light you can’t go wrong. If free is your preference and you’re looking for more storage space, read on to see how Windows Live Skydrive might just be a better fit.

Considering the fact that you can buy a 1tb external HD for $70 to $100 and backup you 1tb drive 10 times faster than the 1mbs you got online, I don't see a reason why you'd be looking into online storage. The cheapest online option is probably Google's $256 / year for 1tb online storage.

Online storage is great for personal files. I use the first site this article reviews, Dropbox, and I'm very happy with their service. The best part is that hey give each new user the same limit so you can basically create as many users as you need and share everyone's space between one another. I'm not saying it's a good thing to do but that's basically how the system works. My blog is onlinestorage.org

I like and use DriveHQ Online Backup Service.Reasons:Integrated with Windows file manager.Reliable and stable software.(Windows only)Realtime or scheduled backup.Backup of files in use.Backup Folders or individual files.Retention of file versions as changes are made.Reasonably priced.1 Gig free.The Company is focussed on quality.I believe their product is underrated. Probably one of the very best services available.See my website for discussions and recommendations on this subject.

I never used online backup service but now wish to try one which is in affordable prize and reliable for my data. I personally feel mozi's interface is a bit complex to understand. Can anyone recommend any such cost-effective and user friendly service?

I signed up for Mozy Free when the article about moving to the cloud was posted, but I'm finding offsite backup to be problematic. I calculated that, at my cable upload speed, it'd take 2 years to backup all my data. It took a whole day to use 1.5 GB of my storage. I suppose I could individually go through my millions of files and decide what needs to be backed up, but wow that'd be tiring. Plus Mozy's software causes HUGE system booting lag (the program likes to severely monopolize the HDD when it starts).

You totally missed the above commenter's point. He was pointing out the fact that the article makes reference to 1.5 GIGABYTE hard drives that one should not RAID.

When was the last time you had a 1.5 GIGABYTE drive in your computer? I actually never have. My very first computer had no hard drive at all, and then the next one had a 4.3 GB hard drive. Didn't you mean 1.5 TB drives?

I personally use iDrive. It has a 2gig free limit and no file size limit. But if you give it 10 or more fake e-mail addresses (mailinator anyone?) it will give you 10 more gigs for free, thats 12 gigs I have free. Their yearly price isn't too bad either and their software works great.

BackBlaze looks nice though, I need to digitally backup everything off-site but I have 1.4TB of data I don't want to loose. I might spring for 50 bucks a year unpimited, its a good deal for data protection! Cheaper than a HDD!

I think the grid graphic shows mozy's business price. Their price for personal use is much more affordable. I use Mozy currently and like it, but have not tried any of the other listed services. Just my two cents.

My company, and myself for personal use, use Data Deposit Box for our backup solutions. $2/gig, and you only pay for what you use, down to the penny. http://www.datadepositbox.com/ or http://www.nerdsbackup.com/

The writer failed to mention one killer aspect of Dropbox -- the files are really stored on your local machine. It's referred to as a 'virtual folder' in the writeup, but no, it's a real folder. You can put it wherever you want on your machine, save files directly into it, sym-link folders into it, install portable apps in it -- basically anything you can do with a real folder you can do with Dropbox.

And if you travel far off the beaten path (visit your family in the backwoods of nowhere, for example) you can still get to all your files with no Internet connection, because they're all saved locally. Any changes won't be synced up to the server until you reconnect, but for me, that is THE killer feature that makes Dropbox the hands-down winner.

I didn't see any mention of upload rates. I have a Mozy Personal subscription, but they cap the upload rates to 1MBs unless you opt for the free version. This isn't such a big deal, but it would be nice to include this information in the review process. It can take a long time to upload 22 GB 1 MB a second, so it would be a nice way to compare services.

Wow! 1MB/s (8192kbps) is amazing upload speed. Most Cable and DSL providers typically limit upload to 768kbps (0.09MB/s) I know that I don't have any problem with the service but it's not likely I'll ever reach that limit. Of course, I, unfortunately, don't have a huge fat pipe to throw stuff at them anyway.

That's what Mozy said when I asked them about it. :) I have a 15 Mb symetrical fiber optic connection, and I was hoping to saturate it. ;)

Anyway, I've been really pleased with Mozy. They even released a special version of the client to help me troubleshoot a problem I was having. After that, they had it fixed in no time. It was great to deal with a company that knew what they were doing.

One minor correction to my previous post. I said you would have to opt for the free version to remove the upload caps, but I meant the paid version.

Wow!
Yeah, I think I'd want them to drop their cap too, though it makes me
wonder, if the limit is per client in which case it might be possible
to run two clients on the same machine and since they'd be updating the
same account it might work, though if it is per account...that sucks

Any suggestions for 1TB backup for Linux? Carbonite, Mozy, and Backblaze all seem to be Windows/Mac only. I built my media server on Linus to avoid the Windows license, but I'd hate to have to re-encode all those files.

http://rsync.net/ has great support for Linux and is fast. Unfortunately, you might have to pay a pretty penny to store 1 TB of data. Their rates go from $1.20 to $0.48 per GB per month, so you are looking at $480/month in the best scenario.

Anyway you slice it, 1 TB is a lot of data to ask someone to store for next to nothing.

My thoughts are that you should really consider what data is irreplacible and create offsite backups for that. The rest you should probably just put into a good RAID system.

I don't know for certain whether this would work but it's worth a shot, get the free version of Mozy (or others) and try it out in WINE. Who knows, it may be the solution you were looking for before paying for something.

Even if Mozy did work under Wine, it would take eons to upload 1 TB of data at 1 MBs (and that's the maximum, average upload rate is lower in my experience) unless he paid for the pro version and that would cost $504/month. 1 TB is just a lot of data to back up offsite.

I'm shocked by the scathing review of Mozy Home, $0.50/GB + $3.95/mo is for *enterprise* use. Especially since MaxPC has previously raved about it. They offer an unlimited use version for home users for $4.95/mo.

http://mozy.com/registration/unlimited

I've used the unlimited edition fora few years now. My only gripe is that the home version does not support Windows Home Server.

Jungledisk is amazing. A few important things you neglected to mention about JD's backup software:

File versioning - you can set how many versions of each file you'd like to save, allowing you to roll back not just to the last backup you made, but to the version of the file that you saved last Thursday or last month. You can also mark the files of which you want to save multiple versions using a size threshold... i.e. only save multiple versions of files that are less than 50MB.

Incremental backup - if you have the "plus" service (or the workgroup service, which I use on all the computers at my job), it will perform block-level backups on files that have changed. Rather than re-uploading that entire 200GB DB, it will only upload the 125MB that changed from the previous version. This helps keep you under those bandwidth limits (once you get that initial backup done).

dropbox also has a form of file versioning (and un-deleting)... I use that for other stuff. I think the best feature of dropbox is the ability to share folders with other users. Works great when collaborating on a project with a few other people.